(NASDAQ:AMZN)—Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that 2012 was a record-breaking holiday season for businesses selling on Amazon. The more than 2 million third-party sellers worldwide on Amazon experienced record holiday growth: unit growth solely from sellers in the U.S. increased more than 40 percent year-over-year. For the year, sellers on Amazon sold hundreds of millions of units worth tens of billions of dollars worldwide.

“We value the breadth and depth of selection that businesses selling on Amazon offer our more than 188 million active customers worldwide,” said Peter Faricy, VP for Amazon Marketplace. “The entire Amazon Seller organization is focused on helping third-party businesses succeed and grow on Amazon. We do this by creating a dynamic marketplace platform that helps every seller deliver the best possible selection, service and prices to all Amazon customers.”

Sellers around the world continued the rapid adoption of Amazon’s innovative fulfillment service – Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). With FBA, sellers of all sizes can choose to have Amazon ship their products directly to customers and offer Amazon Prime benefits, FREE Super Saver Shipping, simple exporting to customers around the world, easy returns for orders placed on Amazon.com and great customer service.

Sellers using Amazon’s numerous other ecommerce services also had a big holiday season. Whether it was the thousands of businesses using the highly scalable Amazon Webstore platform to run their shopping sites, the millions of Amazon customers who chose an Amazon Payments method as a simple and trusted way to pay for purchases on seller websites or the tens of millions of Product Ads clicks that drove Amazon traffic to seller stores, businesses using these connected Amazon offerings set records in sales volume, traffic and services performance.

Sellers on Amazon Holiday Fun Facts:

• Third-party sellers on Amazon.com shipped items from around the globe to customers in all 50 U.S. States and countries worldwide from Aruba to Zambia.
• Amazon’s third-party sellers sold enough Santa Hats for Santa to be able to wear a new hat every day for the next 137 years.
• Amazon’s third-party sellers sold enough smartphone and tablet screen protectors to cover the field of every NFL stadium, four times over.
• Amazon’s third-party sellers sold enough guitar picks to give one to every attendee of Woodstock.
• Amazon’s third-party sellers sold enough mustache pacifiers to give one to every baby born in Washington State next month.
• Amazon’s third-party sellers sold enough tea lights to keep a votive illuminated continuously for over 200 years.

“I’ve been selling on the Amazon platform for about 12 years now, and this has been by far one of the best ever holiday seasons. My business experienced more than a 70 percent increase in orders placed over last year,” said Eli Silver, president of Amazing Deals Online, an electronics retailer based in Edison, New Jersey. “We attribute the boost in orders to our confidence, and customer trust, in Amazon’s FBA program. Without FBA our current infrastructure would not have allowed us to fulfill the orders we generated on Amazon throughout the holiday season. Our typical holiday season selling period ends on December 15th due to the time needed for processing and shipping orders, but with the FBA program, we were able to extend our selling period until December 21st and still have our customers receive their packages in time for Christmas.”

MyGift Enterprises, a mobile accessories and backpack business based in Redmond, Washington, had a record holiday season this year and grew by a large margin compared to its Q4 last year.

“We have to thank Amazon for providing a marketplace and platform that allows us to reach such a wide customer base,” said Stephen Lai, general manager for MyGift. “Implementing Amazon’s FBA service allowed us to focus more of our time on product development and increasing selection, while allocating less energy on fulfillment and customer service. With more time to spend on our core business, we are looking forward to increasing our product selection and further boosting sales on Amazon.”

Businesses interested in selling on Amazon or learning more about the Amazon Services offering can find information at http://www.amazonservices.com.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle Paperwhite is the most-advanced e-reader ever constructed with 62% more pixels and 25% increased contrast, a patented built-in front light for reading in all lighting conditions, extra-long battery life, and a thin and light design. The new latest generation Kindle, the lightest and smallest Kindle, now features new, improved fonts and faster page turns. Kindle Fire HD features a stunning custom high-definition display, exclusive Dolby audio with dual stereo speakers, high-end, laptop-grade Wi-Fi with dual-band support, dual-antennas and MIMO for faster streaming and downloads, enough storage for HD content, and the latest generation processor and graphics engine—and it is available in two display sizes—7” and 8.9”. The large-screen Kindle Fire HD is also available with 4G wireless, and comes with a groundbreaking $49.99 introductory 4G LTE data package. The all-new Kindle Fire features a 20% faster processor, 40% faster performance, twice the memory, and longer battery life.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, www.amazon.es and www.amazon.com.br. As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.